Calendar

Question: Seven to eight hours a day we will spend in a group for integral upbringing. Can I come there alone or with my wife?

Answer: I don’t know whether you can do this and decide this for yourself.

The problem is that we first need to prepare spouses, regardless of their habitual connection with each other, to ensure that they are able to exit that connection. We need to treat them like children, and to make sure that these grownup children are not dependent on their habits.

Let’s say you come to a group. You don’t go there together with your wife. At first you both need to be prepared separately, to make a grown man out of you, and of her a grown woman. You must master the integral skills, understand the system of mutual connection: within a society, in a family, the connection with children, both theoretically and in practice, enacting this with other people.

Only after that should people do the real practical work, that is—with their own spouses, only after they have already accumulated some negative and positive potential. Rising above this isn’t that simple because spouses grow habituated towards some elements of each other’s behavior or they have long-established reactions to certain actions of the other.

We have to rise above all this gradually. That is why we first need to bring a person out of his previous state, present him with a new system of mutual relationships, and after that gradually bring him inside this new system.

But we do not disconnect a person from his family. That is, while the spouses continue to function normally as husband and wife within the family, at the same time, we need to be elevating each of them above their selves, but without touching upon their personal relationship.[64585]From a “Talk on Integral Education” 12/12/11